Asian and Asian American

East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres
Andrew Lam

From cuisine and martial arts to sex and self-esteem, East Eats West shines new light on the bridges and crossroads where two hemispheres meld into one worldwide "immigrant nation." In this new nation, with its amalgamation of divergent ideas, tastes,...

Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement
Edited by Brian Komei Dempster

Many books have chronicled the experience of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II, when over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were taken from their homes along the West Coast and...

Obata's Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from His Trip to the High Sierra in 1927
Woodblock prints by Chiura Obata; Essays by Janice T. Driesbach and Susan Landauer

Chiura Obata, a gifted Japanese-born artist from California, made his first trip to Yosemite in 1927. The trip left a lasting impression in a remarkable collection of sketches, postcards, and letters. This volume includes 80 full-color reproductions of Obata's pencil...

Nothing Left in My Hands: The Issei of a Rural California Town, 1900–1942
Kazuko Nakane; Foreword by Naomi Hirahara

Nothing Left in My Hands is a moving portrait of the lives of early Japanese immigrants in Pajaro Valley, California. Regarded as highly skilled berry growers, the Issei—first-generation Japanese immigrants—were instrumental in the development of strawberry farming in the region....

Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori
Introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada

Born in Oakland, California, in 1910, the young Toshio Mori dreamed of being an artist, a Buddhist missionary, and a baseball player. Instead, he grew flowers in the family nursery business, and—influenced by contemporaries such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest...

Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment
Edited by Kimi Kodani Hill; Introduction by Timothy Anglin Burgard;
Foreword by Ruth Asawa

Chiura Obata was one of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans forcefully relocated from their homes, work, and communities to the stark barracks of desert internment camps during World War II. As an artist faithfully recording the world around him, Obata's...

Samurai of Gold Hill
Yoshiko Uchida; Illustrated by Ati Forberg

Here is a book based on a true, if almost forgotten, incident in California history: the story of the Wakamatsu colony, a Japanese society near Sacramento founded by exiles from the wars that wracked Japan and devoted to growing tea...

Perfume Dreams:
 Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora
Andrew Lam;
 Foreword by Richard Rodriguez

In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese...

Peaceful Painter: Memoirs of an Issei Woman Artist
Hisako Hibi;
 Introduction by Kristine Kim; Recollections by Ibuki Hibi Lee

Born in Japan, Hisako Hibi came to America with her parents as a teenager. When she and her husband were relocated in 1942 to the Topaz internment camp in Utah they became teachers at the art school founded by Chiura...

The Oracles: My Filipino Grandparents in America
Pati Navalta Poblete

As a young girl growing up in California, Pati Navalta Poblete is dismayed to find her American way of life interrupted when her four grandparents arrive from the Philippines. Turning her adolescence upside down, they inspire her to name them...

Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience
Edited with an Introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada; Preface by Patricia Wakida; Afterword by William Hohri

In the wake of wartime panic that followed the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans residing along the West Coast of the United States were uprooted from their homes and their communities and banished to internment...

Letters to the Valley: A Harvest of Memories
David Mas Masumoto; Illustrations by Doug Hansen

In Letters to the Valley, David Mas Masumoto explores his personal memories of food and place, stories about how our food is grown, who grows it, and the suddenly changing context of family farms. These essays—in the form of letters...

Journey to Topaz
Yoshiko Uchida

Based on Yoshiko Uchida's personal experiences, this is the moving story of one girl's struggle to remain brave during the Japanese internment of World War II. In a bleak and dusty prison camp, eleven-year-old Yuki and her family experience both...

Impressions of the East: Treasures from the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley
Deborah Rudolph

Color woodblock prints, early maps of Asia and beyond, and gorgeously detailed scrolls are just some of the highlights in the collection of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. From oracle bones to...

Henry Sugimoto: Painting an American Experience
Kristine Kim with an introduction by Karin Higa; Foreword by Lawrence M. Small; Epilogue by Madeleine Sugimoto; Translations by Emily Anderson

Henry Sugimoto began life as the grandson of a displaced samurai and died in 1990 an American painter. From his early years in California, Paris, and Mexico to the transformative impact of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans,...

Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer
David Mas Masumoto; 
Illustrations by Doug Hansen

As suburbs swallow more and more rich farmland and reforms change the farming industry, the voices of farmers have never been more important. In his latest collection of essays, David Mas Masumoto reminds us that food remains the cornerstone of...

Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town
Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow; Introduction by Sucheng Chan

At the turn of the century, Locke, located in the Sacramento Delta, was the only village in the United States built and inhabited exclusively by Chinese immigrants. This collection of moving oral histories and stunning photographs offers an unforgettable glimpse...